Impact of the global mineral trade structure on national economies based on complex network and panel quantile regression analyses

Mineral resources are considered the upstream raw materials of the industrial chain and represent an important material basis for economic sustainable development. Countries have different mineral resource endowments promote trade development. According to the theory of resource dependence and interdependence, countries have close trade relations, through which they can exchange resources to meet domestic needs and economic development. Different countries have different trading partners, media capabilities and importance in the networks, which make them different in the ability to obtain and provide resources, thus leading to different roles of countries and different influences on their GDP. Therefore, we construct global mineral trade networks and analyze their overall characteristics; we use network parameters to represent the roles of the countries and apply the panel quantile regression method to test the relationship between the roles of the countries and the GDPs. We find that a country's media capacity is beneficial to economic growth, and when a country's resources are readily accessible, it is adverse to the economic development; export is conducive to economic growth, while high dependence on external resources is not conducive to economic growth and it is good for a country's economy to have many important trading partners. In addition, countries with a high economic level should attach more importance to the strategic reserve of mineral resources, while countries with a low economic level should attach more importance to the development of an international market.